Patrick Mahomes, Kansas City Chiefs. (Photo by Tom Pennington/Getty Images)
The league’s last two MVPs are also the two hottest young quarterbacks in the game – and the debate about who is better will last for the next decade.
In 2018, Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes became just the third player in NFL history to throw for 5,000 yards and 50 touchdowns, and justifiably won the league’s MVP award.
In 2019, Baltimore Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson became the second consecutive, second-year quarterback to win the league’s most coveted regular-season prize.
Not surprisingly, then, if one were tasked with building an NFL franchise around any young quarterback in football, Mahomes and Jackson would be near the top of most lists. But, which signal-caller would you choose to build your team around if you were starting from scratch in 2020?
We would take Mahomes for (at least) the following five reasons. And this is not to say that there are not strong arguments in favor of taking Jackson. But, for our money, give us the Super Bowl champion.
Patrick Mahomes’ accuracy makes him a coveted asset
Mahomes is one of the most accurate quarterbacks in the NFL. In fact, in 2018 he led the NFL in the category by a wide margin according to Pro Football Focus. This is not a measurement of completion percentage – which is far more arbitrary and contextual; rather, this is a measure of how “on-point” a pass is thrown.
Another barometer by which one could measure accuracy is through interception percentage – and Mahomes leads Jackson in this category as well (by .5% which sounds small, but is a separation of about 25 percent of the NFL’s starting quarterbacks).
Completion percentage can be increased by any number of ways but especially, through short, high-percentage passes – which were Jackson’s bread-and-butter in 2019 en route to a 66.1% completion rate. Chiefs fans should be very familiar with this strategy – they watched Alex Smith deploy it (quite effectively) for five years.
So, when all else seems sporadic, team contingent, et cetera – we’ll take overall accuracy for the quarterback position – so we’ll take Mahomes.